Airmail and the mailroom

A letter that takes a day

Turn on airmail and your letter takes twenty-four hours to land, the way post does. It sounds like an odd thing to build into software until you have used it. Knowing the reply cannot arrive for a day changes what you write: people stop sending three lines and start telling you about their week.

You can switch it on for a single letter, or set it for good so everything you send travels slowly. If either person prefers airmail, the whole conversation travels that way — nobody has to explain themselves.

The mailroom

Every airmail letter currently in the sky is on this map, tracked from take-off to letterbox. It shows routes and nothing else: which countries are writing to each other tonight, how far the post is travelling, when the next one lands. Never who is writing to whom, and never a word of what is in them.

It is the closest thing the site has to a window. On a quiet evening you can watch a letter cross the Indian Ocean and know somebody is about to have a good morning.

Stamps and streaks

Exchange ten letters with someone and you earn their country's stamp for your album — one per country, however many pen pals live there. Keep writing week after week and the conversation builds a streak. Neither does anything except mark the thing you are already doing.